ShaunGish.com

Anyone else think the app approval process makes them feel like the app you’ve built is a big fat woman in a silver suit trying to bend over backwards to fit Apple’s idea of what they’ll approve?

On a completely unrelated note - what the hell is going on with all of the dumb game shows popping up? I love watching exaggerated stereotypes running through crazy obstacle courses as much as the next guy but whatever happened to game shows that require intelligence?

Seriously - I’ll stop hating on Apple for a while now…

Saw this on Gizmodo and laughed… then cried… then felt ambivalent. It’s sad, but I think that this is actually part of an internal memo sent out to the guys that do the app approval process…

Also:

No Refunds for Pulled/Rejected Apps?

Ok… so today’s announcements about revamping the iPod line was underwhelming to say the least, but something really struck another nerve with me.

I’ve been patiently awaiting the Nike+ announcement for the iPhone… Several times I’ve considered trading my new iPod Classic for my girlfriends iPod Nano just to use Nike+. I’m the kind of person that finds motivation to work out in graphs and charts of my progress… yea… I’m that kind of nerd…

So - the announcement that the new version of Nike+ only works with the second generation iPod Touch is immensely disappointing. Way to go Apple… make a product that is damn near mutually exclusive to the expensive iPhone that I own have one single feature I care about in an attempt to differentiate the two products enough so that everyone walks around with two nearly identical products… one in each pocket I guess…

I understand the reasoning behind not pushing a fitness app for the non-solid state hard drive based classics. That would be a genius bar nightmare… lots of fat nerds with their sweaty iPods that have been shaken to death from a few rounds around a track… but c’mon Apple… hook us iPhone users up. There is absolutely no reason to keep Nike+ away from us other to try to cash in on us double.

So, instead of the sweetness of being able to go out for a jog and, all out of breath, chime in on a conference call to tell some IT guy he’s an idiot while the latest Jack Johnson song is spinning in the background we’re left with the frustration of having to try to remember which iPhone looking thing to pick up to answer the phone call from work saying we’re late… again… hopefully we get it right this time…

Thanks for keeping us fat, Apple.

Useful tools for designing elements for iPhone applications:

• iPhone Interface Template
• iPhone Icon Template

A couple of things to note - the Icon template is setup to just give you an idea of how your icon design will look once the SDK adds all of the highlights/bevel/rounded corners - once you have a design you need to crop the image so that your icon fills the entire canvas and turn off all of the highlight effects/drop shadows.

Inserting a custom icon in an iPhone Application (XCode)

To add a custom icon to your application open your project in XCode and add your icon file (saved as a png file) to your resources folder.  Then open the Info.plist file and change the line for you Icon File to the name of your icon (in my case outbreakIcon.png).

Now run the iPhone simulator (build & go) and you’ll see your custom app icon.  If you need to tweak it just go back to photoshop and tweak away and save over the original png file - when you relaunch your app it the icon will update automatically.

I’ve had a .Mac account for several years now… Not that it’s ever been worth $99/year but I’ve had my @mac.com email address for some time now and I really don’t want to lose it… But the shift to MobileMe will probably see Apple losing my business.

When I heard about the push service and all of the nice sync’ing I thought it was going to be pretty cool… but then I heard that the email addresses are going to all migrate to @me.com… How egotistical does that look - sending an email from myname@me.com?!? But I figured I could live with it… but not the bloatware.

MobileMe is one of the slowest, bulkiest systems I’ve seen… And it’s sad. It’s sad because Apple could have done something really classy and effective with it. It’s sad because the execution is no way to show off their new Javascript framework, SproutCore.

Update: Walt Mossberg agrees…